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Cyber Plants With Built-In Sensors Will Help Fight Climate Change And Pollution

“One day you will step into the garden to look at the flowers – and the flowers will look back at you”. That’s how researchers of the EU-funded PLEASED (Plants Employed As SEnsing Devices) project describe their vision. Plants, in this case are not seen only as inanimate objects – as we often tend to imagine them – but as real living beings, capable of sending and receiving signals.

They do not “talk”, in the sense that we usually give to the word, but the absence of spoken language it’s not necessarily a barrier to communication. Just think of electroencephalography (EEG), in which the electrical activity in the brain is translated into understandable signals of non-verbalized patterns. In the PLEASED project the focus will shift from a single entity (e.g. a human brain that controls a prosthetic device) to a network of entities (a community of plants) that renders an orchestrated response to the environment in which it lives.

By using the same sort of technology that measures brain and muscle movements in human beings, the team of scientists coming from Spain, Italy and the UK led by Italian researcher Andrea Vitaletti, believes we can better understand what is happening in the environment, and in plant-life as a result.

To make plants “talk”, they will be equipped with microsensors developed by the PLEASED team that will collect the signals generated, analyze them, combine them with that of other nearby plants, with the ultimate goal of producing a clear analysis of the environment. “In other words – Vitaletti says – the cyborg plant will tell you how it feels and why it feels that way”.

This could help overcome some of the traditional limitations of climate change studies: while we know what the impacts of climate change and pollution are likely to be, collecting detailed measurements is challenging. Putting sensors in every field or forest is expensive and time-consuming; and while these sensors can measure the state of the environment they can’t tell us what is happening to the plants themselves. The PLEASED project could improve the situation, although, as Vitaletti is eager to stress, it’s just a first step: “If understanding is the first necessary step to change, plants can contribute by providing us with a valuable tool to better understand and monitor our environment – he says, – but then change is up to us”.

The sensors have been produced out of low-cost, readily-available components in the hope that everyone, from nature-lovers to farmers, will be able to make their own plant sensors. Anyone would then be able, for instance, to determine if a plant needed more or less sun and water, or how a specific fertilizer was affecting its health.

The overall architecture of the project also relies on an “open” approach; the collected will be made freely available to anyone interested, in the hope that the members of the PLEASED community will grow and help the researchers to achieve better and more general results, by performing their own experiments and improving its design.

The European Union, under the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) programme, has invested more than 1 million euros in PLEASED. The project, started in January 2012, is scheduled to end in May 2015.

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